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LEGO celebrates accomplished women in STEM

22 November 2017

The LEGO Group has released a new ‘Women of NASA’ set to celebrate great achievements and inspire children to break boundaries.

Under the headline “Ladies rock outer space”, LEGO fan designer Maia Weinstock presented her idea for a Women of NASA LEGO set to the LEGO Ideas crowdsourcing platform. As a science editor and writer, with a strong personal interest for space exploration as well as the history of women in science and engineering, Maia Weinstock’s Women of NASA project was a way for her to celebrate accomplished women in STEM professions.

“In all realms of science, engineering, and technology, pioneering women have historically been underappreciated for their often groundbreaking work. We have also seen that when girls and women are given more encouragement in the STEM fields, they become more likely to pursue careers in these areas,” said Maia Weinstock. “With this project, I wanted to spotlight a fantastic group of women who have made seminal contributions to NASA history. My dream would be to know that the first human on Mars - or an engineer or computer scientist who helped her get there - played with the LEGO Women of NASA as a child and was inspired to pursue a STEM career as a result.”

LEGO Women of NASA include:

Four mini figures: Nancy Grace Roman, Margaret Hamilton, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison and three LEGO builds illustrating the areas of expertise of the four featured women of NASA.

• Nancy Grace Roman’s build features a posable Hubble Space Telescope with authentic details and a projected image of a planetary nebula.

• Margaret Hamilton’s build features a stack of book elements, representing the books of listings of Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) on board flight software source code.

• Sally Ride and Mae Jemison’s build features a launchpad and Space Shuttle Challenger with three removable rocket stages.

To help encourage children to take up a STEM topic, a challenge called ‘Breaking Boundaries’ will be launched on LEGO Life – a social network for children under 13. The challenge asks children to build and share their dream job using the four women of NASA.